now, i'm not going to blame it all on the fiscal cliff. we have a slowing economy. we have slowing economies around the world. but i was at a dinner with a bunch of ceos in washington who are interested and care about this fiscal issue on monday night. and they were talking about we're not hiring. we're allowing attrition to happen. we're holding back on big spending. we want to see what happens here before we go forward. what's interesting about this is that the consumer seems to have a different view. the consumer -- for the consumer so far, this has sort of passed by. i wouldn't say blissful ignorance, but it has not affected their behavior. you had a fairly strong set of economic numbers this fall. the housing market seems to have finally turned up after a period of obviously deep decline. and so consumer confidence, which is one of our best proxies for this kind of thing, has been turning up and really does not yet -- the fiscal cliff does not yet seem to have penetrated their consciousness. for those of us who were in stores over the holiday weekend, stores ar